Why Are You Cast Down, O My Soul?
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Read Psalms 42 and 43 together before this session; they are meant to be read as one psalm. Watch for the refrain that repeats three times, and notice that the psalmist is speaking, in it, not to God but to his own soul. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.
As a deer longs for streams of water, so I long for you, O God! I thirst for God, for the living God.
Psalm 42:1–2
We stay in the room of laments, but we take up a different kind of trouble. Psalm 13 was the lament in miniature, and it taught us to take our complaint straight to God. This next lament (and it is really one lament in two parts, Psalms 42 and 43, joined by a refrain that rings out three times) teaches us the thing that goes hand in hand with taking our trouble to God: what to do with our own downcast soul once we have.
The two psalms belong together. Psalm 43 has no heading of its own, which is unusual; the themes run straight on from Psalm 42; and one identical refrain divides the whole into three matching panels, falling at 42:5, 42:11, and 43:5. Read them as one and you hear a single voice, working through a single trouble, in three waves, and three times, at the end of each wave, doing the same striking thing. So we will read them as one, the way they were written.
The trouble is a particular and tender one. The man is cut off from the house of God. He is far away, somewhere up in the north country, by the headwaters of the Jordan, in the hill of Hermon, and he cannot get to the place where God’s people gather to worship. He remembers, with an ache, how he used to go walking along with the great throng to the temple of God, shouting and giving thanks (42:4), and now he cannot, and the memory makes the absence worse. And while he is cut off, his enemies twist the knife with a single cruel question, asked over and over: Where is your God? (42:3, 10). If your God is so real, where is He now? The believer thirsts for a nearness to God he cannot reach, and is mocked for the thirst.
But the heart of these psalms, the thing that sets them apart and makes them so useful, is what the man does at the end of each wave of trouble. He stops talking to God, and he turns and talks to himself. Why are you depressed, O my soul? Why are you upset? Wait for God! For I will again give thanks to my God (42:5). He takes his own downcast soul in hand and preaches to it. This is the great lesson of the psalm, and it is one of the most practical things the whole Psalter has to teach: when your soul is sinking, you must learn to stop merely listening to it and start talking to it, to preach the truth to yourself instead of passively swallowing the despair your own heart feeds you.
So we will follow the three waves: the thirst for the living God, the flood of affliction, and the plea for God’s light and truth to lead the man home to the altar. And three times we will hear the refrain, and learn from it how a believer talks back to his own soul with the gospel, until, with the psalmist, we are looking past every trouble to God my exceeding joy (43:4 ESV), the One the whole thirsty psalm is reaching for, and the One who alone can satisfy it.
As a Deer Pants
As a deer longs for streams of water, so I long for you, O God! I thirst for God, for the living God. I say, “When will I be able to go and appear in God’s presence?” (42:1–2). It is one of the most beloved openings in the Psalter, and the picture is exact: a deer driven by drought, panting, desperate, with one single need that nothing else can meet: water, and soon. So, the psalmist says, does his soul long for God. Mark carefully what he thirsts for. Not for relief, not for the end of his troubles, not even for God’s gifts, but for God, for the living God Himself. His deepest ache is not for a changed situation but for the nearness of God, to go and appear in God’s presence in the place where God meets His people.
That thirst is itself a work of grace, and worth recognizing as one. A dead soul does not thirst for God; a heart at home in the world feels no such panting. The very longing that feels like torment, this restless thirst for a God who seems out of reach, is the mark of a soul God has made alive, a soul that has tasted enough of Him to know it cannot live without Him. If you have ever felt that ache, that homesickness for God, do not despise it; it is the deer’s thirst, and it is the surest sign that you belong to the living water. For the Lord Jesus stood up and cried, If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me (John 7:37), and to the woman at the well He promised water that would become a fountain of water springing up to eternal life (John 4:14). The thirst of Psalm 42 is real, and it is meant to drive the soul to the only One who can quench it.
Meanwhile the thirst is sharpened by memory and by mockery. I cannot eat; I weep day and night (42:3): grief has taken the place of food, and weeping is all he has. And the memory of better days makes it worse, not better: he remembers walking with the great throng to the house of God with shouts and thanksgiving, and the contrast between that remembered joy and this present exile is its own kind of pain. This is a real and common grief: the believer cut off from the gathered worship of God’s people, by sickness or distance or exile or persecution, who can only remember the assembly he can no longer reach. The psalm dignifies that grief; it is no small thing to be kept from the house of God, and the soul that aches for it aches rightly. The ache is the deer’s thirst again, this time for the place where the living water is poured out among God’s people.
There is a quiet poignancy in who is praying this, too. The psalm comes from the Sons of Korah, the Levitical guild of temple singers, the very men whose calling was to lead the worship of God’s house. And here is one of them cut off from that house, remembering how he went along with the great throng to the temple of God, shouting and giving thanks along with the crowd, now unable to do the one thing he was made and called to do. It is a special grief to be kept from the work and the worship that are your joy. And it speaks to every believer who has been separated, for a season, from the gathered people of God and the means of grace (the homebound, the hospitalized, the imprisoned, the scattered) who can only remember the assembly and ache for it. The psalm tells such a one that the ache is right, that to thirst for the house of God is no weakness but the deer’s thirst, and that the God of the house is not confined to it: He hears the song sung in exile as surely as the song sung in the courts.
Where Is Your God?
Twice in the psalm the enemies press the same taunt, and it is worth stopping on, because it is a question every suffering believer eventually hears. All day long they say to me, “Where is your God?” (42:3; again at 42:10). It is the cruelest thing they could ask, because it aims straight at the wound: you trusted a God who was supposed to help you, and look at you now, so where is He? The taunt uses God’s apparent absence as a weapon against faith, and its sharpest edge is that the believer, in his lowest moments, half-asks it himself. Where is your God? is not only the scoffer’s question; it is the doubt that whispers in the believer’s own dark.
The psalm does not answer the taunt with an argument. It never produces a proof, never explains the suffering, never silences the scoffers with logic. Instead it does two things: it turns to hope (Wait for God! For I will again give thanks to my God) and it keeps reaching for God’s presence. And that is instructive, because the taunt where is your God is finally not answered by argument at all. It is answered by an event. For the day came when the question had a place to point: God was in a manger in Bethlehem, the child named Emmanuel, which means God with us (Matthew 1:23). Where is your God? He is here; He has come down into the very world that asks the question. And the answer goes deeper still, to a cross, where the God who came near went down into the worst of human suffering and abandonment Himself. Where is your God? He is on the cross, dying for the very ones who ask. The taunt that has no answer in the abstract has a final answer in the flesh: God is not absent from the suffering of His people. He came and entered it to the dregs.
And this is worth holding onto for the days the taunt comes not from an enemy’s mouth but from inside our own heads, for it does. Where is your God? is exactly the kind of thing the downcast soul says to itself in the dark, and it is a question we cannot answer by feeling, because the feeling is the very thing under attack. We answer it the way the psalm does: not by working up a sense of God’s presence, which will not come on command, but by turning to the facts that stand outside our feelings. Where is your God? He is at Bethlehem; the records say so. He is at the cross; it happened in history, under Pontius Pilate, whether or not I feel Him near tonight. The answer to the taunt is not a better mood but a fixed event, and when the soul asks where is your God, the believer learns to point it away from the fog of its own feelings to the solid ground of what God has actually done. That is, of course, the very preaching-to-oneself the refrain is about to teach us.
Why Are You Cast Down, O My Soul?
And now the refrain, which is the beating heart of the whole psalm. Why are you depressed, O my soul? Why are you upset? Wait for God! For I will again give thanks to my God for his saving intervention (42:5). (Older translations read cast down and hope in God; the waiting the psalmist commands is the waiting of hope.) Notice the astonishing thing about it: the psalmist is no longer speaking to God. He turns away from God for a moment and addresses himself, his own soul, and he does two things to it. He questions it: Why are you depressed? Why are you upset? And he commands it: Wait for God! He takes his own sinking soul by the collar, as it were, and gives it a talking-to.
This is one of the most important practical lessons in all of Scripture for the discouraged Christian, and it turns on a single distinction. Most of our spiritual unhappiness, the truth is, comes from listening to ourselves instead of talking to ourselves. Our downcast soul is a relentless talker; all the day long it feeds us its commentary (you are forgotten, God has rejected you, it will always be this way, there is no hope, where is your God) and most of us simply sit and listen to it, and sink. The psalmist does the opposite. He refuses to be a passive audience for his own despair. He stands up inside himself, interrupts the soul’s miserable monologue, and preaches back to it: Why are you depressed? Wait for God! He stops listening to himself and starts talking to himself, and that turn, from passive listener to active preacher of his own soul, is the way out of the locked room we warned about in Psalm 13. There the man took counsel in his soul and got nowhere; here he takes charge of it.
But mark what he preaches, because it is not the empty cheering-up the world offers. He does not tell his soul, cheer up, things will get better, look on the bright side. He tells it Wait for God!, and the object of the hope is everything. The soul is not pointed toward improved circumstances, which may or may not come; it is pointed toward God, who does not change. And the ground of the hope is a promise: For I will again give thanks to my God. Not I might; I will. The believer preaches to his soul the certainty that the God who saved him will bring him to praise again, because that God is faithful. This is the gospel turned inward: the believer becoming, for a moment, his own preacher, taking the objective promise of God and applying it to his own subjective, sinking, lying heart. It is the most Lutheran thing a Christian can do alone: to distrust his own feelings, which say forgotten, and to preach to himself the external word of promise, which says hope.
And there is a reason the refrain comes three times and not once. Preaching to your own soul is not a single heroic act that fixes everything; it is a discipline you repeat, because the soul does not stay preached to. You tell it to wait for God, and for a while it does, and then it sinks again, and you must take it in hand again, and say the same true words over again (Why are you depressed? Wait for God!), perhaps every morning, perhaps every hour. The threefold refrain is honest about that. It does not pretend the man preached to himself once and rose up cured. It shows him doing it, and doing it again, and doing it a third time, working his way through three waves of trouble by repeatedly turning his soul back toward God. That is not weakness; that is how faith actually fights in the dark. You preach the promise to your soul as many times as your soul needs to hear it, which is to say, again and again, until the morning comes.
All Your Breakers and Your Waves
The second wave of the psalm goes deeper into the dark before it turns. I am depressed (42:6), the man admits; the preaching has not yet held. And he describes the trouble in one of the most vivid images of overwhelming in the Bible: One deep stream calls out to another at the sound of your waterfalls; all your billows and waves overwhelm me (42:7). It is the picture of a man in a flood, the water roaring, wave after wave breaking over his head faster than he can recover. Anyone who has been through a season when the troubles came not one at a time but all at once, in crashing succession, knows exactly what he means.
But look at the small word that changes everything: all YOUR billows and waves. He does not say the waves came from nowhere, or from blind chance, or only from his enemies. He says they are God’s waves. Even in the flood, even feeling overwhelmed and forgotten, the believer holds onto the truth that nothing reaches him outside his God’s hand, that the very waves going over him are, somehow, His waves, under His command. That is not despair; it is faith of a high and hard order, the faith that will not let go of God’s sovereign care even when His care feels like drowning. It is the same faith Jonah found in the belly of the fish, where he prayed this very line back (the Hebrew is word for word the same), all the mighty waves you sent swept over me (Jonah 2:3), from the deepest deep a man ever sank, and was heard. And it points us, as the deep always does, to the One who went down under the waves of God’s judgment entirely, into three days in the heart of the earth, and rose. The believer’s waves are real, but they are not the wrath; the wrath broke over Another.
And right in the middle of the flood, the anchor holds. By day the LORD decrees his loyal love, and by night he gives me a song, a prayer to the God of my life (42:8). There is that word again: loyal love (older translations, steadfast love), the LORD’s chesed, the covenant faithfulness we anchored to in Psalm 13. By day it is decreed (God orders His loyal love toward His drowning child as surely as He orders the sunrise) and by night, when the day’s distractions are gone and the waves sound loudest, he gives me a song. The believer who cannot sleep for the roaring of his troubles still has a song in the night, the LORD’s own song, and a prayer to the God of his life. He may still cry, in the next breath, Why do you ignore me? (42:9), the honest complaint of Psalm 13 all over again. But the song is with him in the night, and the loyal love is decreed by day, and these hold him while the waves break over him.
Linger on that phrase, by night he gives me a song, because it is a great mercy for the sleepless. The night is when the waves sound loudest; the troubles that can be managed in the daylight come roaring back when the lights go out and there is nothing left to distract from them. And it is precisely there, in the worst hours, that the believer is given a song, and not just any song, but His song, the LORD’s own, a prayer set to music and put in the mouth of His child for exactly such nights. This is part of why God gave His people a Psalter and the church its hymns: so that when a believer cannot find his own words in the dark, and cannot sleep for the roaring, he has God’s words ready to hand, a song to sing back to the One who gave it, a prayer to the God of his life when his own heart has run dry. Many a saint has gotten through a sleepless, wave-tossed night not by thinking his way to peace but by singing, under his breath, a hymn or a psalm he had stored up for just such an hour. The song in the night is one of God’s tenderest provisions for the drowning.
Send Out Your Light and Your Truth
The third wave turns at last toward home. Vindicate me, O God! … For you are the God who shelters me (43:1–2). Even asking Why do you reject me?, he calls God his shelter, running to the very One who seems to have turned away, which is the deep logic of all true prayer. And then comes the petition that gathers up the whole thirsty psalm: Send out your light and your truth; let them lead me; let them bring me to your holy hill and to your dwelling! (43:3 ESV; the NET’s Reveal your light and your faithfulness is a fair rendering, since the Hebrew word means both truth and faithfulness, but it loses the sending and the truth that the next paragraph turns on). The man cut off from the house of God does not try to find his own way back. He asks God to send out light and truth, two guides, like two angels, to take him by the hand and lead him home to God’s holy hill, to God’s dwelling, to the altar.
And God answered that prayer more fully than the psalmist could have dreamed. For when the fullness of time came, God did send out His light and His truth, not as abstractions but as a Person. The Lord Jesus is the true light, who gives light to everyone (John 1:9); He is the One who said I am the light of the world and I am the way, and the truth, and the life (John 8:12; 14:6). God sent His Light and His Truth into the world to do exactly what the psalmist asked: to lead His people home to God, to bring them to the holy hill they could never climb on their own. The believer who prays send out your light and your truth, let them lead me to your dwelling is praying, whether he knows it or not, for the One who came to be the way home, and through whom we now have confidence to enter the sanctuary, the very presence of God, by the blood of the Lord Jesus Himself (Hebrews 10:19).
And see where the light and truth are leading: Then I will go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy, and I will praise you with the lyre, O God, my God (43:4 ESV; the NET’s the God who gives me ecstatic joy makes Him the giver of the joy rather than the joy itself). This is the destination the whole psalm has thirsted for, and notice it is not finally a place but a Person. To God my exceeding joy: to God Himself, who is not merely the giver of the believer’s joy but is the joy itself, the gladness of his gladness. Here the panting deer finds its stream. The thirst that drove the whole psalm was never really for a building or a festival or even relief; it was for God, and it is answered by God, by coming, at last, into His presence, where He Himself is the soul’s exceeding joy. It is the same discovery Asaph made in the sanctuary: Whom do I have in heaven but you? God is not the means to the soul’s joy. God is the soul’s joy. And that joy, tasted now by faith, will one day be ours in full, when the thirst is finally and forever quenched.
And that full satisfaction will be the answer to the very first question of the psalm: When will I be able to go and appear in God’s presence? (42:2). The exile longed to appear before God in the temple, and could not reach it. But the longing reached further than he knew, past any earthly sanctuary to the day the curtain is gone entirely and we will see his face (Revelation 22:4), when faith gives way to sight and we know even as we are known. The thirst to appear before God is the homing instinct of a creature made for its Maker’s presence, and it is a thirst with a guaranteed end. The deer that longs now by faith, coming to God’s altar through the blood of His Son, will one day stand in the open presence of the living God and thirst no more, its exceeding joy no longer reached for in the dark but held in the light forever.
How to Talk Back to Your Soul
Gather up what this psalm puts in our hands, because, like Psalm 13, it is meant to be used. When your soul is downcast (and it will be) you have a choice the psalmist shows you. You can keep listening to it, letting its monologue of forgotten, rejected, hopeless, where is your God run on unanswered until you drown in it. Or you can do what he did: turn and preach to it. Question it (Why are you depressed, O my soul?), refusing to take its despair as simple fact. And then command it, with the gospel, not with empty optimism: Wait for God! For I will again give thanks to my God. Point it not at your circumstances but at your God, and not at a maybe but at a promise. And do it again tomorrow, and the day after, as many times as the soul sinks, because preaching to yourself is a discipline and not a single cure.
And notice what this preaching is not, because it is easy to mistake. It is not denial, and it is not the forced smile of pretending you are fine. The psalmist does not tell his soul to stop feeling downcast, or scold it for being upset, or bury the trouble under a brave face. He begins by naming it (Why are you depressed, O my soul? Why are you upset?), looking the despair full in the face and admitting it is there. Only then does he preach to it. The honesty comes first; the truth comes second; and both are necessary. A faith that will not admit the soul is downcast is not faith but denial, and it cracks under pressure. But a faith that admits the darkness and then refuses to leave the soul alone in it, that names the trouble and then preaches the promise over it, is the real thing. We are not asked to feel what we do not feel. We are asked to tell our feeling selves the truth, honestly, again and again, and to let the truth, not the feeling, have the last word.
Nor is preaching to your own soul a replacement for help, and this matters all the more because the psalm’s own word, in the NET, is depressed. Depression can be an illness of body and mind as real as any other, and a Christian who cannot shake a heavy, lasting darkness has not failed at faith. God has given doctors, counselors, and medicine as good gifts for such illness, just as He gives the physician for a broken bone. If the darkness has settled in and will not lift, or if it begins to whisper that life is not worth living, do not carry it alone. Go to your pastor, who will bring you the Word and the Sacrament and pray with you, and also see your doctor or a qualified counselor. (In the United States and Canada, you can call or text 988 at any hour.) Seeking both is not a lack of faith. The psalmist did not only talk to himself; he longed for the gathered people of God, and the Lord still cares for His people through His Word and through the ordinary hands of those He sends to help.
And preach to your soul the things this psalm has shown you. When it asks where is your God, answer it: at Bethlehem, at the cross, with us. God came near and entered our suffering Himself, so His absence is only ever felt, never real. When the waves break over you, tell your soul they are His waves, under His hand, and that the wrath those waves might have carried fell on Another, who went under the deep and rose. When you cannot reach the presence you thirst for, remember that God has sent out His Light and His Truth, His own Son, to lead you home, and that you have confidence to enter the sanctuary by His blood. And when all else fails, hold the thirst itself up as evidence: the very longing that aches in you is the deer’s thirst, the mark of a living soul made for the living God, and the One you thirst for has promised that whoever comes to Him will never be thirsty again.
For the thirst of this psalm is not finally a torment to be escaped but a homing instinct to be trusted. It is the soul remembering what it was made for. And it will be satisfied: not always on our schedule, not fully in this life, but certainly and at last. There is a scene at the end of the Bible where the long thirst of every downcast soul is answered forever: the Lamb in the middle of the throne will shepherd them and lead them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes (Revelation 7:17). That is where Wait for God! For I will again give thanks to my God is going. The deer will reach the stream. The exile will come to the altar. The tears that took the place of our food will be wiped away by God’s own hand, and the soul that longed will drink its fill of the living God, who was its exceeding joy all along.
Gathering the Threads
We read two psalms as one, a single lament in three waves, each closing in the same refrain, and found in it the believer’s grief at being cut off from the house of God, thirsting like a parched deer for the nearness of the living God, and mocked all the day with Where is your God? We saw that the thirst is itself a work of grace, the homesickness of a soul made alive; that the taunt is answered not by argument but by an event, God-with-us at Bethlehem and the cross; and that even the flood of billows and waves is owned as God’s, under His hand, the wrath of it borne by the One who went under the deep and rose, while His loyal love is decreed by day and His song is given to us in the night.
But the heart of it was the refrain, and the discipline it teaches: that most of our discouragement comes from listening to our downcast soul instead of talking to it, and that the way out is to turn and preach, to question the soul’s despair and command it, Wait for God! For I will again give thanks to my God, pointing it not at our circumstances but at our unchanging God, not at a maybe but at a promise, and doing it again and again, as the threefold refrain does, because the soul does not stay preached to. We watched the psalm pray for God to send out His light and His truth to lead it home (answered beyond its dreams in the Lord Jesus, the Light and the Truth, the way home and our access to God) and arrive at last at God my exceeding joy, the Person the whole thirsty psalm was reaching for. That is how a believer talks back to his soul with the gospel: by aiming it, again and again, at the living God who is the soul’s joy now by faith and will be its full satisfaction forever, when the Lamb leads us to springs of living water and wipes away every tear.
For Discussion
In the threefold refrain the psalmist stops speaking to God and turns to address his own soul: Why are you depressed, O my soul? … Wait for God! What is the difference between merely listening to a downcast soul and preaching to it, and why does that distinction matter so much for a discouraged believer?
The psalmist’s command to his soul is not cheer up but Wait for God! For I will again give thanks to my God. Why does it matter that the object of the hope is God Himself, and that its ground is a promise rather than a wish that circumstances will improve?
The refrain repeats three times, not once. What does that repetition teach about the work of preaching the truth to ourselves? Is it a one-time cure, and what does it model for the believer whose soul keeps sinking?
The believer says of his affliction, all your billows and waves overwhelm me (42:7), owning even the flood as coming from God’s hand. How is it an act of faith, rather than despair, to call one’s troubles your waves (compare Jonah 2:3)?
Twice the enemies taunt, Where is your God? (42:3, 10), using God’s apparent absence as a weapon against faith. How is that taunt finally answered, not by an argument, but at Bethlehem and the cross?
The deepest longing of the psalm is to come to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy (43:4 ESV), a thirst for God Himself, not merely His gifts. How does the Lord Jesus answer the soul’s thirst (John 7:37; John 4:13–14), and how will it finally be satisfied (Revelation 7:17)?
Looking Ahead
So far the laments have cried out of trouble that came from outside: the enemy, the flood, the long exile from God’s house. The next session turns to a deeper and more personal kind of trouble, the trouble we make for ourselves: sin, and the crushing weight of a guilty conscience. We come to the greatest of the penitential psalms, Psalm 51, David’s prayer after the prophet Nathan confronted him over Bathsheba and Uriah, when the king who had everything stood exposed as an adulterer and a murderer before God.
It is the prayer of a man with nowhere left to hide, and it has become the church’s own prayer of repentance ever since: Have mercy on me, O God, because of your loyal love! (Psalm 51:1); Create for me a pure heart, O God! Renew a resolute spirit within me! (v. 10); The sacrifices God desires are a humble spirit; O God, a humble and repentant heart you will not reject (v. 17). Where Psalms 42 and 43 thirsted for God’s presence, Psalm 51 will show us how a sinner finds his way back to it: not by making amends, but by confession, contrition, and the sheer mercy of God. We will learn, from a broken king, how the gospel meets us at the bottom of our guilt.
Read Psalm 51 in full before the next session, along with its backstory in 2 Samuel 11–12. As you read, notice where David places his hope: not in his own efforts to repair what he has done, but somewhere else entirely.
Closing Prayer
O God, the living God, our souls thirst for You as a deer pants for flowing streams. We confess that we are too often cast down, that we listen to our own despair instead of Your promises, and that when the waves break over us we forget whose hand commands them. Teach us to talk back to our downcast souls with the truth: to question their despair and to command them to hope in You, again and again, as many times as they sink. Be Yourself our exceeding joy, and let no trouble persuade us that You are absent, for You came to us at Bethlehem and went to the cross, and You are with us still.
Send out Your light and Your truth to lead us home: Your own Son, the Light of the world and the Way and the Truth, by whose blood we have access to Your holy presence. Be our song in the night and command Your steadfast love toward us by day. And keep before us the day when the Lamb will lead us to springs of living water and wipe away every tear from our eyes, when the long thirst is quenched forever and we drink our fill of You. Through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.